The Memory Book

by Howard Engel

  The three nurses now stood a degree removed from the interns, leaving a deferential neutral space between them. Were these the remnants of ancient battle lines? The doctor talked on, not noticing. “Mr. Cooperman, here, has a classic case of alexia without the often attendant agraphia. Mr. Cooperman will sit up for us now, so we may examine the back of his head. Kindly slip out of bed, Mr. C, so we can get a squint at you …”

  He went on to enlighten the interns, but without passing anything new along to me. It was a theatrical display, lacking only the rattle of a snare drum to keep the tempo brisk.

  “Apart from your difficulty reading, are there any other visual problems?”

  “Not really. I— Oh! I was looking at the rain coming down the window one day. It was dripping down the window in vertical lines. When I looked at it, the picture began breaking up, like a bad TV reception. The picture divided into narrow vertical slices, like a Venetian blind, but up and down, not across.”

  “Uh-huh. You tell me if you see that again.”

  “Another thing: whenever I see circles, they seem to get bent out of shape: like bicycle wheels that have been in an accident.”

  “Well, well, well, gentlemen, we have symptoms abounding. You will keep us abreast of any new developments, won’t you, Mr. Cooperman?”

  The doctor was a dapper little man with tailoring that translated into big bucks, if you could read the messages. Still, he had nicked his chin shaving this morning; so everything wasn’t rosy in his life. His thinning hair was combed artfully across his pink scalp. The interns and nurses remained suspended by his machine-gun-like comments on everything from my blood pressure to the blinking fluorescent tube behind my bed.

  “This shouldn’t put you off your golf game for long, Mr. Cooperman. You’ll be back on the course in a few weeks. Good morning. I’ll look in on you again later in the week.”

  After they’d gone, it took me a few minutes to recover my identity. I did better when I wasn’t being examined under a microscope.

  I lay back in my bed thinking. I had a lot to think about.

  Yesterday—I thought it was yesterday—I could never be sure any more—I thought I could pick up the pieces of whatever investigation I was working on and start making up for lost time. Now I realized that before I could get back on the trail, I had to throw away still more time recovering.

  So, recognizing that I could see myself getting a little obsessive around the ears, I decided to ease off on the desire for fast and dispassionate revenge on whoever had put me in hospital. I would even agree to give up the dispassionate part. A good old-fashioned revenge would suit me fine.

  Although I wanted to get on with my life, I could see that I was still not in any shape to deal with a snippy telephone operator, let alone the villain who clobbered me. Back off, Cooperman! Catch your breath.

  Chandler says that a detective has to do his job no matter what. He could have said, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” I could see that logic working in books and in the movies, but in real life it’s tougher. What brought me here? I went too far, I guess; I got too close. I’d upset my attacker enough for him to take extreme measures. Hell, I was lucky he didn’t do a better job on me.

  Of course, when my memory cleared, when I was back on my feet, that would be a different proposition. I could see that; detectives in books have to have a narrower code of honour. There’s no time for PIs in books or movies to lie about, recovering. The story has to move. To gallop! The fictional detective has an audience following his every move. He’s never alone. He always has to do the right thing. He’s like that salesman in the play I saw in summer stock: he’s only got a smile and a shoeshine working for him. If this was a movie, I’d crawl out of my hospital bed, shake my head under the shower, and tear off the bandages as I grabbed my clothes on my way back to the street. The camera wouldn’t miss a thing.

  How many of my old cases would make good movies? Not many. The people with the problems weren’t important enough. The villains, too were, nobodies. When there was a swindle, the money or property involved wouldn’t have excited a real New York-based bad guy. A scam artist from LA wouldn’t get excited about my best cases. And for an Englishman, my cases have been too random, not confined to a tidy manor house with a suspicious butler and a library full of suspects at the end. Now, how did my mind take me here?

  I picked up the novel beside me. The letters swam meaninglessly into one another. Groups of two or three letters caught my eye with a distant familiarity, like a half-remembered face in a crowd. “The,” I read. “The lady … in …” I kept on with it: “The Lady in the Morgue.” The word “morgue” gave me a hard time, but I managed to decipher it: “The Lady in the Morgue by Jonathan Latimer.” Had I known that? Had I already read this? I’d leave my problem to someone like Jonathan Latimer’s two-fisted, ironic private eye, William Crane. Do it for me, Bill. Attaboy!

  “What are you grinning at?”

  I knew the voice. I turned and saw Anna. I nearly leaped out of bed, but she closed the distance between us faster than I could direct the thought to my legs. It was a clinch right out of the movies. Later, crediting Byron, Anna told me that the only proper measure of a kiss was its length. I agreed; the poet knew more about kissing than many pre-Victorians.

  “Well!” she said, as we began to catch our breath, “you seem thoroughly restored in some departments. How does your head feel?” She was sitting on the edge of my bed. The look of concern on her face was serious.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t even think about my head. It’s my memory and things inside my head that are giving me trouble. It’s like trying to find my way in a house of mirrors. I’ll have to learn how to use the distortions to point the way to the truth.”

  “Always the philosopher! Candide reborn! Still digging in the manure pile hoping to find a pony down there.”

  “Not even imaginary ponies live in dung heaps. I’ve missed you, professor.”

  “Me too. Are they treating you right?”

  “I’m fine. I get to argue with my nurses, and soon I’ll be having my meals with the others down the hall. I’m in terrific shape, really.”

  “Do you remember my earlier visits? The nurses said you probably wouldn’t.”

  “I remembered your name, didn’t I? Don’t be greedy. But the nurses are right; I don’t remember anything earlier than today. Or yesterday. Recently. I’ll remember this visit.”

  “Promises, promises.”

  “What do you know about what happened? I hope you’re not part of this conspiracy to keep me guessing.”

  “Look, Benny, I just popped in to say hello. I’m late and illegally parked. Don’t make me any later than I am already. To give fair answers to those questions, I’ll need more time than I have right now. But don’t despair. I’ll be back in two days. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “No, don’t mope. Anyway, I see that I’m being ousted by a nurse with a bar of soap and a sponge. And right now you need a wash and brush-up more than you need the little I can add to what you know already. I’ll try to call you tonight.”

  In a moment she’d been replaced by a strange nurse who went all over me with rubbing alcohol or something, chattering away my fragile memories of Anna’s short visit. I let the rub-down pull me away from my anger and frustration into a somnolent feeling of dissolving tensions and my current default position: sleep.

  The lights were on when I looked up again. The days passed quickly in the hospital. My roommate was snoring softly on the other side of the room, but the sky was still bright enough to be called day. Somewhere, out of my ken, the sun was sinking, leaving a rosy stain that marked the brickwork on the walls and rooftops of the hospital across the street. I took a look at the novel in my hand. Opening it at random, I tried to read the words. The first word looked like “posting.” I went on to the next: “uncertainly.” Posting uncertainly? Didn’t make sense. Must be “pausing uncertainly.” Yeah, that was better. I
went on, decoding the words and word combinations one at a time, and returning to the beginning of the sentence to make sure I hadn’t lost the sense. “Pausing uncertainly on the goddamn step.” Something not right; look again. Sharpening my focus, “goddamn” became “gotton,” then “bottom.” Yes! Bottom! “On the bottom step …” And so it went, phrase by phrase, line by line, until I was too tired to go on. I put the book down and closed my eyes. In a few moments, I was back aboard that train again, watching the metal-cornered black suitcase come toward me. The pain in my head was sharp at first, but it eased away to nothing as I continued to feel myself sliding again into sleep. Sleep, as Jerry noted—There! What’s-his-name’s name had popped back again!—was becoming my middle name. I’d always enjoyed it, but the concussion had made me a grandmaster. Sleep made up the biggest part of my days.

  SIX

  “Hello there, Benny! How are you?” The voice came from a distance. It was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it until I sat up in bed. “You’re looking great. You’re not pulling a fast one, are you?”

  Then a second voice added: “This is a good-sized room you’ve got here for just the two of you.” They were two Toronto cops in plain clothes: Staff-Sergeants Jim Boyd and Jack Sykes of the Toronto Police. Their names weren’t available to me when I first saw them, but they returned later as the visit continued. The term “plain clothes” mustn’t be taken literally. In my experience plainclothes cops in Ontario usually dressed like hunters just out of the bush. Heavy boots, wool stockings, a growth of beard, jackets with fluorescent red markings, and wool caps. Snowshoes were optional. In a hospital corridor they stood out like moose in tutus or giraffes in a boardroom. The detectives and I had worked a case a year ago. Maybe two.

  “Brought you a magazine.” Jack Sykes set it down carefully at the foot of my bed. He handled the copy of Time as though his acquaintance with print was recent, which I knew wasn’t true. I put it down to nervousness. Both policemen looked at me like I was dressed in a cheap tuxedo and laid out in my coffin. They couldn’t look away fast enough.

  “At least you’re not being broiled alive in here,” Boyd commented.

  “There’s some sort of eclipse going on out there,” Sykes noted. Both cops looked at the window. “The sky’s still dark from it,” he added.

  I remembered thinking, not half an hour earlier, about the approaching sunset and noticing the ruddy glow against the hospital windows across the street. I was no longer a fair and accurate observer. Even the simple coming and going of daylight had me confused.

  I tried to cross my legs under the coverlet without success. Sykes was admiring the ceiling plaster, Boyd was examining the treasures on the table beside my bed. The attempts at conversation had stopped and we were locked together in heavy silence. Finally, Sykes shook his head at his partner and straightened up. Boyd sighed, then nodded. He had been shifting from one flat foot to the other, eager to be anywhere but here. Sykes ran his big fingers around the rim of the straw hat he was holding close to his body. He looked like a man caught taking a floral tribute away from a funeral because he’d never found the right moment to put it down on the coffin.

  It’s funny about hospital rooms. Some people never can relax in them. Even as visitors, they stand woodenly, speak unnaturally, and leave at the first opportunity. Maybe they see the hospital bed as a deathbed. Maybe it’s the subdued indirect lighting at the head of the bed, and the equipment for taking blood pressure, supplying oxygen. Any patient unlucky enough to be here is obviously not long for this world. I decided to try to put them at their ease. I cleared my throat, loudly. They both blinked.

  “Am I glad to see you guys,” I said. Sykes’s mouth dropped open. It was like he hadn’t expected the body in the coffin to answer back. “I’m going stir-crazy in here.”

  Boyd and Sykes looked at one another. Both of them glared back at me in the bed.

  “I know,” I said, “I don’t sound like I’ve got a badly functioning noggin, but I have. Ask my nurse. She’ll tell you. I’ve got a hole in my head you could lose a dollar’s worth of change in.”

  “He walks, he talks, he philosophizes,” Sykes said. “What else do you do?” This was more like the cop I knew than the man shifting his feet.

  “That’s all I can do. But when has talk got any work done? I want to get out of here as fast as I can.”

  “Hold on, Benny.” Sykes said. “We were just talking to the nurse, Mrs. McKay. You’re not getting out of hospital for a long time yet.”

  “Have you found my car?”

  “You don’t need a car right now. What you need is rest. Rest and physiotherapy.”

  “What’s the matter with you two? I need to get back on the street.”

  “Benny, these aren’t your local streets. You’re in our parish and you haven’t got a local media czar making things awkward for us. That was last time; this is now. Best thing you can do is listen to your doctors.”

  “So, the car has turned up!”

  “Didn’t say one way or the other.”

  “If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t have looked at one another the way you just did. And you would have used the fact that it was still missing as an argument to keep me in this bed. Come on, fellows, give me a break. Help me get out of here!”

  Again they exchanged glances.

  “We’ll keep you briefed, Benny. That’s the best we can do. There wasn’t much to go on, you know. They clobbered you, lifted you into a Dumpster behind Clarendon House, at the corner of Spadina and Wessex, and drove your car behind Barberian’s Steak House on Elm Street.”

  “That’s all you got?”

  For a moment, the boys looked as guilty as trapped grave robbers. And then the moment passed.

  “Benny, we are working on it. Okay? We got a couple of clues we’re working up over at forensics. It’s still early days.”

  I didn’t mention the fact that now I had a vague idea of how long ago it had happened. “What sort of clues?”

  “Get real, Benny! Let us get on with our jobs.”

  “That’s right. We just dropped in to see how you were progressing,” his partner chimed in.

  “Are you interested in what I can remember about all this?”

  Sykes’s eyes narrowed. “Sure we are. What were you doing? Who were you messing with? What do you remember?” They looked at me with expectation written on their faces like jam on a six-year-old’s.

  “Not a blessed thing.”

  Sykes gave a low wheeze that was intended as a whistle.

  “I don’t remember who hired me, when I came to Toronto, or why I was hanging around that Dumpster, if I was hanging around that Dumpster. Sorry, fellows. I’ve just come out into the light a little while ago, and I honestly can’t remember a damned thing. Yesterday I couldn’t tell you my own name. Today is better, but I still have a long way to go.”

  “We’ll leave you our numbers in case it starts coming back to you. Because you’re the only living witness to”— here his partner cleared his throat—“to what happened that day.”

  “What have you got going on the front burners?”

  “Benny, we’re giving this our best shot.”

  “Yeah, a mugging outranks trespassing on vacant lots and running a red light.”

  “There’s something doing at one of the colleges,” Sykes added.

  “Which one? There are so many these days, I can’t keep up.”

  “Simcoe College. You know it? Buried behind Massey College?”

  “What little I know about higher education in Grantham is enough. Here, I’m really lost.”

  The boys shook my hand and moved toward the door. When they got there Sykes turned around and casually asked: “Oh, Benny, did you ever know a Flora McAlpine?”

  This was a curious parting shot. Must be important. I thought about both the name and the question. It took a few seconds, but no buzz of recognition stirred my consciousness.

  “Nothing comes to mind. But then, names aren’t m
y party trick these days. Why?”

  “Just wondered whether it sounded familiar. You think about it. Maybe something will stir in there. And you’ll let me know?”

  “Sure,” I said. The question left me with an odd feeling. It was like an echoing ping from the battered back of my head. I wrote the name down before I forgot it. Big or little, important or frivolous: I was capable of forgetting them all. The mention of the name came shortly after talk about one of the university colleges. Was there a connection?

  After the boys left, I was alone with my roomie’s snoring. I couldn’t get peeved at Sykes and Boyd. They couldn’t help me to get out of the hospital. Besides, having me where they knew how to find me gave their investigation the only flicker of light they had. And I had enough on my plate just keeping the days of the week straight. I thought of the progress I had made in my reading. In ten or fifteen minutes, I could work my way through a paragraph of six lines. Lucky I wasn’t working this case. At my speed I would have it wound up by the time Sykes and Boyd got their pensions.

  SEVEN

  Mom and Dad walked through the doorway, Ma in front with a big smile on her face, the kind that hides the pain underneath, and Pa a step or two behind her with his good poker face giving nothing away. She was wearing her Paris Star dress from Montreal, and Dad was dressed more casually in a rust-coloured summer jacket, which he removed as soon as he sat down. Funny how I recognized the dress! It occupied a place of honour in her closet.

  “So! At last you’ve decided to wake up!” Mom gave my foot a squeeze under the covers. “Every time we’ve been in to see you, you’ve been off chasing rainbows.”